"During the Iranian revolution of 1979, its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sneered that the West didn’t understand that the revolt was not just intended to lower the price of watermelons, that is was waged for spiritual reasons.
Yet in the West this very mistake is made by those who consider themselves enlightened and tolerant. They rail against how the West allegedly fails to understand Islam and the Middle East properly. Ironically, their arguments conflict with something that most Arab intellectuals and perhaps half the population of Iran or more already knows about what's wrong with their societies.
A perfect example of this problem is the mistranslation of the word Islam, which means not peace but submission to God’s will, which is precisely what Farooq is explaining. That's what is in command, not logic, not material conditions, or any other such "superficial" explanations."
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What can I sell you, today?
How the Middle East (Often) Thinks: Logic is For The Infidels
Barry Rubin
Buried deep in an obscure article about a Pakistani poet-politician is a clear presentation of one of the most powerful ideas shaping this contemporary world.
The article was written by Pakistani columnist Shah Nawaz Farooq in the Urdu-language Roznama Jasarat newspaper and translated by MEMRI. Its theme is about how the poet Muhammad Iqbal, who died in 1938, urges all Muslims to engage in Jihad even if they pursue this warfare against the infidel by non-military means.
Yet like a diamond in a coal mine appears in passing the following side:
"A characteristic of the infidel's psychology is superficiality. It means that a man gives importance to the apparent causes, and considers that to be everything. Worshipping logic is also a pillar of the infidel's psychology. The infidel weighs everything on a scale of profit and loss, and in light of 'two and two make four.' His standard is not good and evil–but profit and loss. This is why he wants to see himself as powerful at an apparent level."
One could write a library full of books on this little paragraph but here’s the short version. If one believes the deity guides the world completely and has set all the rules for human behavior, then all man-made morality, reason or logic are not guides to life or reality but mere illusions. Humanity is weak because Allah is strong; humanity has no real freedom because its choice is to obey the rules of Islam or be in rebellion against God's will. Divine standards of right and wrong transcend any human categories. Believing that events come out of material factors and can be understood through human logic is to be "superficial," to miss the true basis of events.
There is much, here, that reflects Western history of course. In much of the ancient world and then again between the fall of Classical civilization and the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, the rise of the scientific method, and other developments—roughly between the fifth and fifteenth century, this kind of thinking dominated. But such a world view eroded long before it came to an end completely. Logic, enthroned in Greek and Jewish civilization, was already an integral part of Western life.
Of course, the development of the modern world, science, and other things was made possible by the enthronement of logic. The last three centuries of history, despite many setbacks, have intensified its hegemony. Without it, the West would still be full of extremist ideology, hatred, superstition, violence, and low living standards. In other words not unlike most contemporary Muslim majority lands.
(Yes, there are still people in the West thinking in similar terms, religious "fundamentalists" and believers in bizarre conspiracy theories. But the differences between this minority in the West and majority in most Muslim-majority states are important. In the Western case they don’t run the society and government; they don’t successfully repress alternative view points; they don’t run the media or the schools; they don’t threaten and use violence against their adversaries except in a tiny handful of cases; and even they themselves have absorbed a great deal of logic, science, secular philosophy, and democratic standpoints whatever they say to the contrary.) Continue reading
Rubin Reports
0 Comments - Share Yours!:
Post a Comment